Opinion Brief: Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Click here to learn more about innovation and the wonders of wood. You can expect us in the unexpected.

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Good evening, subscribers. You know, the election is over a year away … and this town still does a collective backflip whenever a new poll comes out. At iPolitics we love the horserace as much as anyone — but we love tracking the long-term trends in politics even more.

Right now, this is the long-term trend everyone needs to worry about: angry, underpaid young people, getting angrier. This morning we gave you the first look at a stunning new report from the Conference Board of Canada on the deep and widening income gap between the boomer generation and those in their 20s and 30s.

Tonight, one of the report’s co-authors — David Stewart-Patterson — argues that the income gap is going to tilt the table in federal and provincial politics — and party leaders are going to have to take sides in a war between generations. “The generation at the top of the income heap today fought long and hard for principles like equal pay for work of equal value — and yet their children face two-tier workplaces where they get paid less for the same work for the same employer. How long will it be before younger Canadians start to push back?”

Scott Clark and Peter DeVries are back with some news about deficit elimination: It’s not nearly as important as politicians seem to think it is. Sure, it’s political suicide these days to talk about running up deficits — but governments still have to borrow and vanquishing the deficit is meaningless in the absence of a healthy economy. “Our politicians and the people who elect them are going to have to grow up a bit. Stable, healthy economies are not allergic to borrowing. Insisting that deficits must be eliminated everywhere and always is not an economic statement — it’s a political one.”

Paul Adams looks at how the pharmacological approach to mental illness — and the profound sway drugmakers have over the health care system itself — may be doing far more harm than good. “Many patients see their symptoms worsen on these drugs. Often, when that happens, they are simply switched to another drug, or even have another medication piled on top of the first. Some researchers are now concerned about ‘iatrogenic’ illness — mental disorders caused or prolonged by the very drugs prescribed to control them.”

And Jeffrey Goldberg wonders if it’s time for Republicans in the U.S. to stop painting President Obama as a weak-kneed pacifist hippie — given the fact that his administration has crossed off most of the top names on the international terror hit list, and the characterization might be undermining his efforts to block Islamic State in Iraq. “Cartoonish interpretations of Obama’s policies could hurt, among other things, his ability to project American strength and unity of purpose to wobbly allies and mendacious adversaries.”